- Anderson, Brian C. and Adam D. Thierer.
A Manifesto for Media Freedom.
New York: Encounter Books, 2008.
ISBN 978-1-59403-228-8.
-
In the last decade, the explosive growth of the Internet has allowed a
proliferation of sources of information and opinion unprecedented in
the human experience. As humanity's first ever many-to-many mass
medium, the Internet has essentially eliminated the barriers to entry
for anybody who wishes to address an audience of any size in any
medium whatsoever. What does it cost to start your own worldwide
television
or
talk radio
show? Nothing—and the more print-inclined can join the more
than a hundred million blogs competing for the global audience's
attention. In the United States, the decade prior to the great
mass-market pile-on to the Internet saw an impressive (by pre-Internet
standards) broadening of radio and television offerings as cable and
satellite distribution removed the constraints of over-the-air
bandwidth and limited transmission range, and abolition of the
“Fairness Doctrine” freed broadcasters to air political
and religious programming of every kind.
Fervent believers in free speech found these developments exhilarating
and, if they had any regrets, they were only that it didn't happen
more quickly or go as far as it might. One of the most instructive
lessons of this epoch has been that prominent among the malcontents of
the new media age have been politicians who mouth their allegiance to
free speech while trying to muzzle it, and legacy media outlets who
wrap themselves in the First Amendment while trying to construe it as a
privilege reserved for themselves, not a right to which the
general populace is endowed as individuals.
Unfortunately for the cause of liberty, while technologists,
entrepreneurs, and new media innovators strive to level the mass
communication playing field, it's the politicians who make the laws
and write the regulations under which everybody plays, and the legacy
media which support politicians inclined to tilt the balance back in
their favour, reversing (or at least slowing) the death spiral in
their audience and revenue figures. This thin volume (just 128 pages:
even the authors describe it as a “brief polemic”) sketches
the four principal threats they see to the democratisation of speech
we have enjoyed so far and hope to see broadened in unimagined
ways in the future. Three have suitably Orwellian names: the
“Fairness Doctrine” (content-based censorship of broadcast
media), “Network Neutrality” (allowing the FCC's camel
nose into the tent of the Internet, with who knows what consequences
as Fox Charlie sweeps Internet traffic into the regulatory regime it
used to stifle innovation in broadcasting for half a century), and
“Campaign Finance Reform” (government regulation of
political speech, often implemented in such a way as to protect
incumbents from challengers and shut out insurgent political movements
from access to the electorate). The fourth threat to new media is
what the authors call “neophobia”: fear of the new.
To the neophobe, the very fact of a medium's being innovative is
presumptive proof that it is dangerous and should be subjected to
regulation from which pre-existing media are exempt. Just look at the
political entrepreneurs salivating over regulating video games, social
networking sites, and even enforcing “balance” in blogs
and Web news sources to see how powerful a force this is. And we have
a venerable precedent in broadcasting being subjected, almost from its
inception unto the present, to regulation unthinkable for print media.
The actual manifesto presented here occupies all of a page and a half,
and can be summarised as “Don't touch! It's working fine and
will evolve naturally to get better and better.” As I
agree with that 100%, my quibbles with the book are entirely minor
items of presentation and emphasis. The chapter on network neutrality
doesn't completely close the sale, in my estimation, on how something
as innocent-sounding as “no packet left behind” can open
the door to intrusive content regulation of the Internet and the end
of privacy, but then it's hard to explain concisely: when
I
tried five years ago, more than 25,000 words spilt onto
the page. Also, perhaps because the authors' focus is on
political speech, I think they've underestimated the extent to
which, in regulation of the Internet, ginned up fear of what I call the
unholy
trinity: terrorists, drug dealers, and money launderers, can be
exploited by politicians to put in place content regulation which they
can then turn to their own partisan advantage.
This is a timely book, especially for readers in the U.S., as the
incoming government seems more inclined to these kinds of regulations
than that it supplants. (I am
on
record as of July 10th, 2008, as predicting that an Obama
administration would re-impose the “fairness doctrine”,
enact “network neutrality”, and [an issue
not given the attention I think it merits in this book] adopt “hate
speech” legislation, all with the effect of stifling
[mostly due to precautionary prior restraint] free speech in all
new media.) For a work of advocacy, this book is way too
expensive given its length: it would reach far more of the people
who need to be apprised of these threats to their freedom of expression
and to access to information were it available as an inexpensive
paperback pamphlet or on-line download.
A podcast
interview with one of the authors is available.
November 2008 